Book Abstract
Is journalism really so truthful that Walter Lippmann once advocated that “there can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil….”? (TE 2016) This positive view on journalism can be contrasted with the opposing one by Alexander Cockburn, who suggested instead that “the First Law of Journalism” is “to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.” (TE 2016a)
Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), journalism (in relation to truth and non-truth) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe this challenge to the conventional wisdom in journalism does not mean that it is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to journalism)—like media studies, communication studies, information studies, professional ethics, aesthetics, political science, sociology, economics, social studies, cultural studies, history, psychology, and so on—should be ignored. On the contrary, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.
Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of journalism (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between truth and non-truth—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the multidimensional theory of journalism) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.
This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about journalism (in relation to the dialectic relationship between truth and non-truth) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.